Words of Water - Literary Panel

This Saturday I attended the Eye on India: Words on Water event here at Stanford. The event was primarily an exploration of various aspects of Indian history and artistic development since it gained its independence. I found the authors particularly interesting for a number of reasons. First, the experience of writing about a particular place struck as both a constraint and a means of exploration. All of the authors had written novels about Mumbai a sprawling Indian metropolis with millions of people in statuses of society. Initially it struck me as obvious that when writing about a particular locale you would have to study it in detail, live there for a time, get to know the life, breath, and smell of the city. All of which would be essential if you were to have any chance at rendering an accurate and lively recount of a city in literary form. Moreover, all of this would entail a great deal of exploration; talking to people, engaging the community in community events, etc. However, what wasn’t expected was the degree of difficulty that could be present in achieving this. The idea that community or locality that you are trying to penetrate may see you as a foreigner, even when you know the language and understand a great deal of the culture. This is compounded by the fact that cities don’t have a right or wrong to what should be depicted and taken away. Thus, when you are presented with the task of converting your thoughts and impressions to paper there may be times where you feel restricted, where you want to give as accurate a portrait as possible, where you may feel beholden to the community that you have tried to penetrate to give them life, substance, nuance.

Another aspect that the authors spoke was their sense of time and change. First, that when you are creating a setting you necessarily are seeing it at a specific moment in time. Thus, when you leave a place you necessarily freezing it in time, both in your memory and on the written page. But cities and the people that inhabit the are not stagnant, they are forever changing. Many of the authors spoke of how they were interested in the interaction between insiders and outsiders, natives and foreigners in a place like Mumbai. Something that stroke a particular chord with me was how places can become too familiar where you can no longer distinguish or appreciate the specific nuance and uniqueness of a place, and therefore you have to purposefully alienate yourself in order to regain that perspective. I remember when I first came back to California after spending 6 months in a small Italian city and being struck at how wide the streets were and how low the building were in my home town. It’s a stark contrast to the narrow Italian streets and high palazzo architecture of Italian cities, which I never appreciated before.

The authors also spoke intermittently about form. One writer who had written an crime/mystery narrative spoke about how he liked to employ characters that would allow him to move both horizontally between different communities in a landscape as well as vertically between the different classes and institutions of power with that landscape. One example he gave was of beginning with a murder of a prostitute outside the city, someone who is seen as an outsider of the community, a deviant. Then having an officer have to investigate the murder, someone who appears to be an instrument of the state who has access to politicians and decision makers. Thereby creating characters who can facilitate a more complete view of a city landscape and the people who inhabit it.